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Re: [microsound] 1D



> Science is not the only thing that progresses.  Science doesn't always 
> progress.  Often it just spins its wheels.  Music progresses when it 
> comes up with something new, some new paradigms, some new concepts and 
> ideas.  Bebop was a progression over swing in jazz.  Free jazz was a 
> progression over cool.  Jazz has never progressed beyond free jazz. 
>  That's why jazz is dead.  Oh you can still hear some great free jazz 
> these days, but it isn't all that different from what you heard in Paris 
> in 1969 on BYG.  And there was a lot more urgency then because it was 
> new.  You can also hear some fine bop quartets here and there.  They 
> play nice stuff, completely within an idiom.  It's nothing new.   On the 
> other hand, electronic music is still an area where you can find new 
> things.  It's still a ripe area for exploration primarily because of all 
> the new concepts, like in the performative, etc.  Go to almost any time 
> in musical history and you can see the importance, necessity and 
> motivation of progression, from the classics to the present.  As usual, 
> any new progression requires a new set of ears.  We don't have them yet 
> about much electronic music.

You're speaking like there is no music outside western culture.  But that is 
another conversation.  As far as not having the ears, Luigi Russolo played his 
first concert with his orchestra of experimental music his friend commented 
that it was "like showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows".  From my 
performance experiences, which I admit are few, it's still like that.  The fact 
is there aren't many people, and there never will be, who appreciate and 
understand experimental music.  It has nothing to do with the age of the 
thing.  People have been making strange music all through history.  And I'm not 
talking about Mozart or Stravinsky.  They were just pushing the envelope of a 
system which already existed. If the point of music is to progress then I'm 
out.  I won't go to music school in May.  I'm also out if the point is to earn 
respect from an audience because of your skill.  As I said in my last response 
that doesn't work.  You cannot expect it.  If an audience does recognize your 
skill then it's a plus.  The skill is the mouth by which we convey a message.  
It can have a complex vocabulary or a very simple one.  Neither mouth is 
incapable of profundity.  I agree that the tools of music have progressed, but 
just look at the music and try and give yourself an example of an original idea 
that's happened in the last 20 years.  Something that has more to do with the 
music and the performance than the tools.

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